Instead of a Conclusion
When I started recording “political soundwalks” in 2019, I didn't know that I would soon witness dramatic changes in the political soundscape of Belarus, a creative eruption and then the disruption and uprooting of Belarusian music scenes. I could not know that this unplanned research would lead me to analyze sonic violence and to think about silence more than about sound and music.
The concept of voice – its suppression, silencing, stealing, claiming back, and recovery – is important for understanding the Belarusian social, cultural, and political environment. And the idea of “listening-as-obeying” is central for understanding the key demand of the regime: “Listen to the father!”, uncritically and gratefully. It is used by propaganda – in media or in songs like Anatol Yarmolenka’s “Listen to the father!” – and it is also the basis for disciplining rituals of ostensible listening to Lukashenka’s speeches. Those who don’t want to listen to the regime’s voices, still cannot escape hearing them due to the opposition media reproducing propaganda narratives, often with little effort to mitigate their effects. When Lukashenka is sick, both state medics and opposition media discuss his voice loss, as if astonished by a sudden transformation of this ubiquitous and seemingly immutable voice (Naša Niva 2023c).
Legitimate or not, supported or despised, Aliaksandr Lukashenka still dominates the political soundscape of Belarus, demanding attention to his ever-longer and less coherent speeches and doubtful ideas. Reinforced by toxic voices of propagandists, his voice instills anxiety, fear, paranoia, and hatred for three decades already. In 1994, people gave him their voices/votes (which is the same word in Belarusian and Russian languages), regarding him as “a man of the people.” But since then, Lukashenka hasn’t trusted their voices – preferring to steal them.
It is not surprising that critical or just not too loyal voices are silenced systematically, with opposition politicians, activists, and intellectuals often held in prisons “incommunicado”, in silent isolation or under sonic pressure. Exposure to noise and loud radio music in prison cells can be classified as sonic torture, and is a part of a wider sonic violence continuum that also includes forced vocalization widely used to break down detainees’ morale, to “hijack” and weaponize their own voices, to use them as a tool of suppression and subjugation. “Repentance” videos of people forced to self-incriminate and ask for a pardon have become one of the regime’s favorite methods of terrorizing the population.
"The system loves silence" is the title of a painting by Uladzislau Bokhan (Laškievič 2023). Indeed, silence is at the heart of dictatorships. When people rise against the system, they renounce silence, break, and mock it. If they fail, it glues their lips even tighter. Before raising voices, they might not have noticed the true taste of silence; and now they know its shades well: from exhilarating wordless understanding and trust to a nauseating burning of (self)enforced muteness.
The popular Russian saying “be silent, be cunning” captures one of the survival principles.[45] But the notion of (discursive and non-discursive) political silence is important for understanding not only Belarus but other authoritarian post-Soviet countries as well (Orlova 2022). The “protective” silence of Belarusians is taken as a sign of loyalty to the state by outer observers who do not grasp the local political context and the suffocating atmosphere of police terror. But keeping silent doesn’t necessary mean loyalty. One doesn’t sing songs or chant slogans sitting in an ambush, preparing to retaliate or just hiding from the enemy. Silence is not only a source of shame, an ill spell or a shield; it can also can be the last means of stubborn defiance.
The rule of silence was temporary undermined by people tired of being muted, and 2020 was so far the loudest year in the contemporary history of Belarus. During the pre- and post-election protests, all sides of the political conflict used sound – noises, voices, and music – to fight for urban and political space, creating new or desperately maintaining old acoustic territories. Trying to symbolically demarcate, protect, and sanitize its “sacred spaces”, the state used propaganda and music aired from street loudspeakers and military mobile broadcast stations. “Playlists” used to pacify or intimidate protesters, featured mostly Soviet music made before the Perestroika – songs by military pop bands but also contemporary “patriotic” pop by loyalist singers. “Stability and order” is the central idea of the state’s ideological discourse and on the eve of elections the frequency of these words used in the state media escalates. So it is not surprising that many “patriotic” songs are so soporific, like a song by Anatol Yarmolenka and Viktoriya Aleshka: “If it’s just a moment, let it freeze. Time is not flying, not running.” During the state celebrations, for example the Victory Parade, time not just freezes, but seems to turn backwards, as if the music and speeches open a portal to the Soviet era.
The “court” musicians and singers play a great role and bear responsibility for the morbid dream they helped to induce within the society.[46] Functions and motives of the special services, functionaries of “The Power Vertical”,[47] and propagandists are obvious and not hidden. But the state supporting/supported musicians, cultural workers, and athletes, who claim to be “beyond politics” and just working to “give joy, beauty, and honor”, are serving the same goal of enforcing the ideology and greasing the authoritarian state machine. They do their job under the cover of and in the name of art and culture – tacitly, softly lulling people with their hypnosis and creating an illusion of a "country to live in", a pure "crystal vessel" where the "skies are peaceful" and no violent repression happens.
At the start of the 2020 protests, the most popular protest song was Viktor Tsoy’s “Khochu peremen”, written in the late-USSR era. But since then the Belarusian anti-authoritarian movement has created hundreds of songs, poems, and chants, and invented new ways of being heard. Musicians and poets broadened their audience and helped to create “temporary autonomous zones” that became loci of peaceful creative protests, drawing thousands of people, establishing not only underground networks and new communities, but also new acoustic territories (however fleeting they were), sites of memory (Nora 1997), and new toponyms on city maps.
The months when DIY concerts and cultural events turned Minsk into a city-wide grassroots festival, is a unique phenomenon in the history of cultural resistance and community building that deserves a deeper study. The war has largely discredited and mocked the peaceful forms of protests, but the bitter-sweet memories of celebrating solidarity against injustice and police violence are too valuable for a nation, torn by repressions and forced exodus, to dismiss these experiences as false and insignificant. The authorities certainly did not consider these protest loci as insignificant: for them they were “points of pain” that needed to be neutralized. In 2024 the state is still targeting musicians who were often at the first ranks of the 2020 demonstrations and raised people’s spirit through songs and music videos. There are more musicians in jail or emigrated now than ever before.
Several hundred thousand people have emigrated from Belarus since 2020, and most of them won’t be able to come back in a foreseeable future. Scattered across Europe or the rest of the world, and longing for sounds of home, the Belarusian diaspora seeks connections through music, art, and language. Former political prisoners who suffer from traumatic effects of repressions and torture, often turn to folk music and singing for healing.
The dramatic events of the recent years have damaged and transformed the music scenes of Belarus. Just making good music is no longer enough: the audience demands from musicians to choose sides in the political conflict. The independent music scenes became uprooted and now function in completely new environments abroad, relying on networks they built before and especially in 2020. Artists learn to survive in new countries, and although the alternative media and cultural initiatives are in permanent search of funding, together they create viable cultural and entertainment events running parallel to – or across – the official one.
For a long time, even a hypothetical alternative to Lukashenka’s rule seemed unimaginable and the idea of voicing criticism was frightening for many people who often asked: “If not him – then who?!” But many new voices appear and get amplified every day, breaking the illusion of unanimity; voices of politicians, experts, bloggers, and of ordinary people telling the truth about Belarus.[48] For four years already, not only Lukashenka addressed the nation on New Year, but Sviatlana Tsikhanovskaya too, and the pro-democratic media produce entertainment shows with musicians, actors, and comedians, replacing both official culture and Russian entertainment content that many Belarusians consume as an alternative to the state-sponsored productions.
Despite its purely decorative use in some segments of the state’s cultural sector, a few state media, and in public transit announcements, the Belarusian language continues to be discriminated and its use in the public sphere is increasingly less tolerated by the state; pro-Russian activists gain more political influence as Russia’s control and influence over the country strengthens. Belarusian speaking detainees risk harsher treatment and the Belarusian culture, media, music, and literature has seen more attacks since 2020 than ever before. In 2023-2024 the national text corpus was severely censored with only 12% of the initial texts left after a half year hiatus (Naša Niva 2024c). Even a popular, illustrated Belarusian calendar titled “Don’t be silent in Belarusian” (a pun meaning “speak Belarusian”) was added to the state list of “extremist materials”. The main opposition slogan Žyvie Biełaruś! (Long live Belarus!) was banned in November 2022. But Belarus cannot be banned or silenced; it will live on.